The real stories from inside the F1 paddock

The importance of Neil Armstrong in F1

Mankind has always searched out the limits and gone beyond them. First there were the explorers and mariners who charted the darkest corners of the world. Then came the flyers who triumphed over the skies. Then came the record-breakers who wanted to go faster and higher.

And then came the astronauts…

Ask a lot of the technical people in F1 about what first sparked their interest in high technology and you will find a surprising number who will talk about NASA and the astronauts of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in particular the Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 when six crews (12 men) went to the Moon and returned safely. A seventh mission (Apollo 13) went wrong and the world watched breathlessly as NASA botched its way to bringing the astronauts home. The kids across the world watched all of this on black and white televisions and lived in awe of the likes of Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Irwin, Mattingly, Swigert and Lovell. Their exploits inspired many to pursue careers in scientific subjects that led them ultimately to concentrate on the cut and thrust of Grand Prix racing, where engineers see their work in action far more quickly than in other industries.

Thus the disappearance of the most famous astronaut of all, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, has had rather more of an effect in the sport than one might imagine.

McLaren’s Ron Dennis summed it up well.

“I was saddened to hear of the death of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon,” he said. “The achievement of Armstrong and his colleagues remains perhaps the single most iconic triumph of scientific ambition, against all odds, that the world has seen. It was, and is still, truly inspiring. It certainly inspired me. In 1969, when Armstrong took that famous ‘one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’, I was a 22-year-old motor racing technician. But Armstrong showed me, and many others like me, that in our own small way we could also dare to try – and ‘dare to try’ remains a McLaren mantra to this day.”

Formula 1 is a world that is full of people who dare to try, in their different walks of life, and there is no doubt that Armstrong and his colleagues played an important role in developing that ethos.

Share this:

Related

61 Responses

These guys led the way in the field of high tech…there is no way to briefly summarize their profound effect on F1 and racing in general…from aero to the materials found in drivers uniforms, along with application of the scientific method in carefully recording and analyzing data, the space initiative of the 1960’s shaped modern auto racing.

Hi Connor
There are very few photographs of *all* of Armstrong on the moon. You can see a couple of 16mm frames; and bits of arm or leg, but nothing like the iconic photo of Buzz in this post. Whether Buzz was busy with rolling out experimental equipment or a bit frustrated about being the second man on the moon…..either way he didn’t get a clear photo of Neil.
RIP Neil Armstrong

Very sad news about Armstrong although I wasn’t around in 1969. Does Adrian Newey come into this ‘Dare to Try’ category? So its just the same as pushing the envelope, in other words.. seeing what you can get away with regard FIA technical people and their rules. I guess NASA didn’t have people who said ‘No’. Great blog as always

Well, that’s the unfortunate part of it, isn’t it? NASA engineers were focused on an unprecedented goal and were limited only by knowledge and physics. In contrast F1’s engineers are boxed in to focus on tweaking an extra 0.05% out of what arbitrary regulations permit… and if they do it too well, then the regulations will be altered to outlaw their achievement.

I understand the dilemma about limiting the speed to what human drivers can reasonably cope with. Nonetheless, it is a shame that the engineering talent can’t be focused more on something more constructive and inspiring than subtle aero tweaks that have no relevance to anything but the rules. It creates engineering inbreeding (of achievement, not of talent) which weakens the evolution of motorsports. It also erects huge barriers to fans’ ability to understand and appreciate what decides the outcome.

I don’t pretend to be smart enough or knowledgeable enough to know how to fix this. But surely there are people who could if presented with the challenge.

Yeah. Some of us are mate! I’m a year older than Ron, we watched the ghostly images of the moon landing on gigantic monolithic tvs with a tiny nine inch screen, thinking then, that we would by now, 40 odd years later, be living on other planets and have regular space travel. Or instead be living in a nuclear wasteland.
We never knew until later disasters, how much those astronauts were shot up there by politics and hope. Like F1, safety came in at a much later date.
If only they had the precision technology back then it would have been a lot safer.

But had not JFK made his other famous pledge to put a man on the moon (at the time intense fear of a Russian advantage) where would we be? (NB the first was declaring himself a sausage in Berlin) Had Werner Von Braun and his henchmen not been working on V2 and V3 at the end of WW2 and been captured the Americans, but instead by the Russians again the world would be considerably different.

(Am reminded of Stephen Fry’s novel “Making History” in which a chance to stop Hitler being born results in total Nazi domination of europe. “Gloder” arises instead)

Yes he is, he was what Jack Brabham called a “mechanic” although he hates to be reminded of his past, for some strange reason. I was a 13 year old “high school student”, or schoolboy, at the time of the lunar landing. It really was an amazing time. Joe, I don’t think a successful return of a crew from a disabled spacecraft could be termed a “botch”, though even if they had to jerryrig up the spacecraft to ensure the crew’s survival.

I am of the generation where – and I must admit things blur into one event here – where at one time, we were pulled out of lessons at school so 400 of us could crowd round what was at the time a large TV screen. Another time my parents woke me up in the middle of the night to watch.

Whilst I never pursued a scientific career, like most boys of my age, I had a poster set on my bedroom wall of fast cars and the earth viewed from the moon, the lunar module and so on. Inspiring times. There is another school of thought that perhaps this all happened too early. Imagine if they did it today with resources available. Did I read somewhere that the total available computer memory on the lunar module was 36k?

Yup and that would have been in discreet components, no chips no ICs.
I bet they had a slide rule as a backup. (Still have one of mine somewhere) So gone are the days of “By SR” in the margin when you had faked an a result from an experiment and had a guess. With a Log Log slide rule the range of possible answers was wide.

The Apollo Guidance Computer did indeed have 36K of memory, but that was the ROM containing its software. It only had 2K of actual RAM! Having said that, they were 16-bit words (of which one was a parity bit) rather than 8-bit-bytes.

Although the RAM was magnetic core, there WERE integrated circuits in it, in fact it was the first ever computer to use them. 2800 of them!

It ran at a pretty respectable for the time clock speed of 2MHz.

Wikipedia has a reasonably good article here, although I read a much better one on the web back in 2009 when all the 40th-anniversary stuff was going on, which I can’t find right now.

I salute all those involved in that historic achievement, and RIP Mr. Armstrong.

I think we are extremely privileged to be living in a time where space travel has been made possible. It is a truly extraordinary achievement in the context of human civilisation. Driving a car is already an action that involves speeds that the human body was not designed to cope with, yet we manage to master this quite well, including surviving high speed crashes. Being shot off in a space shuttle involves speeds of a completely different magnitude. And on top of that, Neil Armstrong was pioneering space flight so there were many, many question marks about what to expect along the way. I wonder what the statistic was of him and his crew returning safely to Earth, if there was such a calculation?

By the way, a fascinating statistic I read – the Mars Scientific Laboratory landed only 2.4 kilometres from the center of the target. Incredible really, considering that Mars is at least 55 mio km away from Earth (depending on the orbit).

Armstrong said in a rare interview earlier this year that he thought they had a 90% chance of returning safely, but only a 50/50 chance of actually making the landing. Had he not been the extraordinarily cool pilot that he was they would have had to abort the landing after the computer tried to put them down on the edge of a crater in a boulder field.
In fact, all of those astronauts were extraordinarily cool under this sort of intense pressure – that’s why they were chosen. Armstrong never failed to acknowledge the work of the nearly 400,000 people who worked on the programme, which is why he displayed so much humility over time. He didn’t see himself as a hero – it wasn’t as if he personally decided to make the trip and did it all himself.
I’m chuckling to myself as I imagine the words of a certain British ex-World Champion being interviewed after an imaginery moon landing. “Well Murray, it was a fantastic trip, great view, everyone worked so hard for this, but we had so many problems, what with the computer alarms and that bloke next to me putting me off calling out numbers, and the dust… it was just awful. And you know, you can’t breathe down there.” etc etc

Joe,
I was a kid in 1969 and watched it on TV in the UK. It did inspire me and twenty years ago when I visited Kennedy Space Center as just another visitor it was huge to see the launch pads from a mile or so away. To be that close to a place that history was made, to get to see a Saturn 5 up close, very moving.

Even at that time I did not know that the area of technology I work on, radar, would lead me to be a part of the launch team for the last 21 launches of the Space Shuttle. It was a heck of a privilege, something I will look back on that period of five years with immense pride, always! The immense power of a big rocket launch is inspirational to all that get to observe it first hand.

Launches look hard from the outside; you are stunned when you have been on the inside of the program to see what it takes to get a launch compleated. The greatest professionals I have had the privilege to be around, even inside the military and aviation industries, were on the shuttle program.

I made sure my son got to see a launch during my time on the program and was there for the very last shuttle launch. I hope that a manned program comes to pass and soon so his generation has something to aspire too, it needs to be inspirational and that means onwards to Mars. Without it a generation might pass right by Engineering.

I am of that age of Mercury & Apollo. The original Mercury astronauts were introduced to the world on 9th April, 1959, the day of my birth and one of my earliest and most treasured memories is watching Neil’s small step. I also watched the 13 saga with bated breath and am to this day annoyed by the Neanderthal conspiracy theorists who insist it was all fake and that Elvis shot Marilyn and such.

I am of that age of Mercury & Apollo. The original Mercury astronauts were introduced to the world on 9th April, 1959, the day of my birth and one of my earliest and most treasured memories is watching Neil’s small step. I watched the 13 saga with bated breath and am to this day annoyed by the Neanderthal conspiracy theorists who insist it was all fake and that Elvis shot Marilyn and such.

Actually, this Armstrong news annoys me a bit. It’s much like the dilemma pilots and air traffic controllers love to toss around when half drunk and love sick… “who’s the boss”, “who’s more important” or in F1 the drivers and the hundreds of employees back at home who make it possible for the drivers to actually take to the lime light by literally standing on the fruits of their (the peoples) hard labor, ingeniously bright ideas, pain and passion. The drivers bring their bit to the game for sure (to coin a Massa phraseology) they help put focus the game, but, Neil Armstrong passing away is in my view an important moment to think of all those who made the dream possible, then probable then reality – NASA is a big name but the physics of it all the dedication and focus of all involved… 1 thing is for sure – No matter what Neil would have died a hero at any time. But so too should all those nameless pieces of the jigsaw who actually came up with the numbers, fought out the design and then went and built the darn thing… these were the people that fueled the dream! My thoughts my respect goes out to them as much as to the flyboys!

That’s pretty rich. Sure he had support, like any mission, adventurer, explorer and so on, but it was he and Aldrin who first landed on the moon, and he who piloted the Eagle, so without someone capable, their work would have been for naught, this isn’t quite comparable to the driver, plus he was a skilled Aeronautical Engineer who was able to contribute to the work being done in a capacity more than just being the pilot.
We remember the captains of ships, expeditions, Columbus, Drake, Cook, deGamma, Scott, Peary, Hillary, and Shackleton, as we should Armstrong.

Joe, I was 7 years old at the time and remember exactly where I was; the black and white TV in the lounge and the sheer excitement. My father showing me newspaper cuttings during the days following. I still marvel at the magnitude of what all the astronauts of both the Apollo and more recent Shuttle programmes achieved and still feel that the risks those guys took in the early days are often taken for granted. Being shot into orbit on a giant firework the height of St Paul’s Cathedral – the mighty Saturn V with computers no more powerful than a pocket calculator (or so we’re led to believe?) Thanks for the post – could sit and and look at that iconic photo of Aldrin on the lunar surface for hours. PS – welcome back and enjoyed reading about your holiday in France!

I’ll remember that when the next Great British explorer passes away. Sorry, who from GB is in the same league of accomplishing something of Global acclaim, would that be Tim Berners Lee? (outside techies, many around the world didn’t have much knowledge of him before the Olympics)

Really I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but would say that if he were still alive the passing of Gargarin would be similarly noteworthy.

Don’t understand this remark. I’ve always followed the space programme here in the UK. The moon landings were certainly world news as opposed to ‘local’ news. I’m sure I was as excited as a 7 year old in 1969 living in London as my equivalent in Florida? Can certainly see how it inspired some of my generation to become scientists/Physicists/Aeronautical engineers.

And let’s not forget that NOMEX, a product that was invented by DuPont and found its way in protective racing driver clothing and saved many lives, (think Jos Verstapppen’s Benetton pitstop at Hockenheim, German GP ‘94) was a product that was first worn in space suits. It is not fire resistant but instead prevents body heat to increase from thirty eight to 41 degrees in less than [a mortal] 30 seconds.

If you need a great book to read then look for Homer Hickham’s “Rocket Boys”, aka “October Sky”. Brilliant account of a bunch of high-school kids in a working class mining community who take up model rocketry, inspired by NASA, in the hope of obtaining college scholarships. It really captures that era and the effect that Sputnik had on America’s psyche. It’s easy to see why so many scientists were inspired by the space program.

Don’t want to throw a damper on this but all the effort the went into the space race was as a result of the cold war, and the development of ICBMs.

It seems odd, that most reading this, do not remember living every day wondering it the 4 minute warning would come, today it would all end, mutually assured destruction.
Remember when the moon nearly triggered the US defences and WW3? We read Hemingway’s “On the Beach” and for us it could easily have been reality.

And yet out of all that came huge advances in technology which have now passed by and been improved upon. It is sad to see the death of probably the greatest remembered astronaut and the end of the shuttle program which as no doubt been responsible for many new inventions, a few of which may be seen in pubic one day. But they are still up there in the ISS ironically now serviced by the Russians.

The nice thing was that the moon and the space race served a proxy to war, and one with at least some amazing accomplishments and stories, and technological benefits. But as the article said, just this acomplishment served as motivation for people to try to achieve technical accumen

As I was only 7 years old at the time, I was only conscious of a man walking on the moon. The prospect of a 4 minute warning didn’t occupy much of my thinking time way back then! At the time, my ‘world’ consisted of just football and Neil Armstrong.

It’s strange to think it now but at the time a lot of people were saying that the astronauts weren’t taking as big a risk as the explorers of old as they had all the test runs and all the ground staff monitoring things. It just goes to show, I suppose, how little thought some commentators gave to the achievements of the programme. Lying on so many million pounds of highly explosive fuel, knowing that you have just enough air to breathe to complete the mission with a minimum of reserve, knowing that there is now way you are going to get rescued or find somewhere safe to land if things go wrong, knowing all of this and still volunteering for the job on an officer’s standard pay took something special. I cannot imagine how they must have felt to be on the moon and turn to look at the earth so far away. Incredible. And to think how nerve-wracking it was for those in ground control to have been responsible for the safety of those men so far away. They are all true heroes.